Thursday, 17 July 2014

The Revisionist NBA Draft - Tableau Storyboarding

Welcome to the disclaimer. So yes, this is a slight cheat as I have already posted the basics of this before but now there is more data and a lot more story / charting. I feel like I scrapped the surface with the last dashboard so here is a deeper dive in to the data.
_______________________________________________________________________________

As a history student there are normally two standard views on any event in history - the traditional and the revisionist. Well here is the revisionist view of Bill Simmons reranking of NBA draft picks from the last six years.

For those who haven't come across the NBA draft before, it's a method to distribute the top young talent from colleges and teams across the world to the NBA teams. There is an egalitarian approach to the draft as each year, those teams who don't make the playoffs are put in the lottery to see who gets the 1st pick. The worse your record in the regular season, the higher your chances are of landing that top pick. Therefore, you would expect the top draft picks to turn in to the top elite players in the league.

Well this visualisation is a study to determine if in fact the best players go to those teams choosing first? Do some teams fair better than others?

This visualisation also acts as my entry in to the Third Tableau Iron Viz Competition for 2014 as the visualisation takes advantage of the new story points feature in Tableau Desktop version 8.2. This is a really interesting feature that allows the author to guide their audience through the story they have found in the data. But Tableau is focused on allowing the user to explore data as well and the viewer can still explore the visualisations in the story without effecting the overall flow and what is coming up.

The feature has a lot to be developed still (more formatting control, altering tooltips, creating multiple charted tabs etc) but rather than having to build multiple versions of the same chart is a massive step on if you want to show different views of it.

As always, looking forward to the feedback on whether you enjoy the work or learn anything from it.